REDD in the news: 3-9 December 2018

REDD-Monitor’s round-up of the week’s news on forests, climate change, and REDD. For regular updates, follow @reddmonitor on Twitter.

3 December 2018

Indigenous peoples and local communities are the best guardians of biodiversity – Indigenous caucus at the UN Biodiversity Conference 2018
By Caroline de Jong, Maurizio Farhan Ferrari, and Tom Dixon, Forest Peoples Programme, 3 December 2018
“Indigenous peoples and local communities embody humanity’s creative intelligence and wisdom in our care and love for Mother Earth. We are on the frontlines to protect the world’s remaining biodiversity, and many of our leaders have been killed defending human rights and the environment.”
This was the key closing message of the of the caucus of indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) participating in the UN Biodiversity conference, held in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, 17-29 November 2018. The Biodiversity Conference combined the 14th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP14), the highest governing body of the Convention, as well as the 9th meeting of the Parties to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (COPMOP9) and the 3rd meeting of the Parties to the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing (COPMOP3).

Don’t forget about tropical forests at COP24
By Josh Ettinger, Global Canopy, 3 December 2018
As thousands of representatives from governments, NGOs, and business descend on Poland for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) COP24, they will have a lot on their plates. Many are now aware that ending deforestation is vital toward achieving the Paris Agreement, but tropical forests are still at risk of being sidelined among other priorities.

COP24: ten years on from Lehman Brothers, we can’t trust finance with the planet
By Tomaso Ferrando, The Conversation, 3 December 2018
Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008. The investment bank’s collapse was the drop that made the bucket of global finance overflow, starting a decade of foreclosures, bailouts and austerity.
The resulting tsunami hit the global economy and public sector, discrediting finance and its attempts to extract large rents from every aspect of the economy, including housing and food. An alternative was urgently needed.

COP 24: Transparency, ambition and carbon markets on the Paris rulebook agenda in Katowice
By Alex Hanafi, Environmental Defense Fund, 3 December 2018
As the world’s leading climate scientists made clear in a recent special report, we are in the race of our lives against climate change, and we need to move faster. The Paris Agreement’s rapid entry into force in 2016 broke records, but records are also being broken outside of the UN that emphasize the urgency of action: record wildfires, record temperatures, record storms, record levels of carbon in the atmosphere.

David Attenborough: collapse of civilisation is on the horizon
By Damian Carrington, The Guardian, 3 December 2018
The collapse of civilisation and the natural world is on the horizon, Sir David Attenborough has told the UN climate change summit in Poland.
The naturalist was chosen to represent the world’s people in addressing delegates of almost 200 nations who are in Katowice to negotiate how to turn pledges made in the 2015 Paris climate deal into reality.

Climate treaty plan urged to cut warming
By Alex Kirby, Climate News Network, 3 December 2018
Could a new climate treaty be the way to tame global warming? With world leaders receiving constant demands to act far more urgently to limit climate change, events at either end of Europe are today increasing the pressure on them. At both, hopes are focusing on international diplomacy.
In eastern Europe the Polish city of Katowice is hosting the latest round of annual negotiations held by the United Nations Framework Climate Change Convention (the UNFCCC), formally known as the 24th Conference of the Parties, or COP24 (due to end on 14 December).

COP24: World’s nations gather to grapple with looming climate disaster
By Justin Catanoso, Mongabay, 3 December 2018
Alarming signals – arising from the Earth and from scientists – have prompted urgent calls for a decisive international response to climate change as leaders from nearly 200 nations gathered in Katowice, Poland yesterday, Sunday, 2 December, for the start of the 24th annual United Nations climate summit.
This Conference of the Parties, known as COP24, is the third such meeting since the Obama administration, with China as a vital partner, helped engineer the historic Paris Agreement of December 2015. That accord marked the first time ever in which the world’s 196 nations achieved consensus on the need to reduce their carbon emissions with a goal of keeping global temperature rise under 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100.

Climate Denialism’s Stupidity Is the Point — And Its Weakness
By Liam Denning, Bloomberg, 3 December 2018
One problem I have with “climate denial” is the name. Nobody denies there’s a climate (not yet, anyway). I guess it fits better into a tweet, but that brings me to another problem I have with climate denial: It’s really stupid.
To illustrate what I mean, here’s President Donald Trump trashing his own administration’s dire climate assessment, published with impeccable timing on Black Friday, to the Washington Post last week:
“One of the problems that a lot of people like myself — we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers.”

Recognition of indigenous territories as a REDD+ strategy: An example from the Peruvian Amazon
By Julia Naime Sanchez-Henkel, CIFOR Forests News, 3 December 2018
A recent Rights and Resources report provides strong evidence on the importance of recognizing and protecting indigenous rights towards mitigating forest-based emissions and curbing global warming. As a Ph.D. student coordinating the third round of data collection of CIFOR’s Global Comparative Study on REDD+ in Ucayali, Peru, I was pleased to find an on the ground example of why this is important and how tenure security can help achieve the objective of REDD+.

Paris Agreement fight could push US out permanently, warn top Obama officials
By Karl Mathiesen, Climate Home News, 3 December 2018
UN climate talks this fortnight could determine whether a post-Trump US president would rejoin the Paris Agreement, according to two former top Obama officials.
At discussions in Katowice, Poland, almost 200 countries will try to agree the Paris Agreement ‘rulebook’. That should lay out how countries will enact the accord, for example how they report their efforts to fight climate change. But as talks began on Sunday, thousands of points of disagreement remained.

4 December 2018

Even in a carbon-constrained world, fossil fuels remain dominant: WoodMac
By Robert Walton, Utility Dive, 4 December 2018
There has been a lot of bad climate news lately, and WoodMac’s new analysis isn’t any better.
The United States’ economy could face hundreds of billions of dollars in economic damage a federal report warned last month. And a United Nations report in October described a bleak future within 30 years that included coral reefs dying, food shortages and more extreme weather.
Now, WoodMac concludes, it’s too late to stop it.

Katowice COP24 Climate Change Talks: Climate Justice Speeches
World at 1C, 4 December 2018
As the name would suggest, the United Nations climate change negotiations are a conversation that takes place between States. But as members of global civil society we are given the minimal opportunity of a minute or two to share our views from the back of a plenary hall. It’s not much, but as you can see below, our groups do their best to take advantage of it.

Analysis: Which countries have sent the most delegates to COP24?
By Robert McSweeney, CarbonBrief, 4 December 2018
On Sunday, the 24th Conference of the Parties (COP24) got underway in Katowice in Poland, bringing thousands of negotiators together for two weeks of intensive climate talks.
COP24 is widely considered to be the most important UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) international climate negotiations since the Paris COP in 2015. The latest talks come before an end-of-year deadline to produce a “rule book” to flesh out the detail of the Paris Agreement, such as how the ratchet mechanism will work for ramping up ambition on emissions reductions.

How to Scale Up Investments in Nature
By Mark Tercek, Medium, 4 December 2018
On November 26, 2018 Mark R. Tercek, CEO of The Nature Conservancy, delivered the following speech at the UN Environment Finance Initiative’s biennial Global Roundtable in Paris, France.
Good afternoon. I’ve been asked to identify what we need to do to scale up investments in nature.
It’s a question I think about a lot. I spent 24 years working as an investment banker and the last 10 years as the CEO of The Nature Conservancy. This is what I think about. And this is what I want you to start thinking about more.

Colombia tropical forest fires spike after 2016 Peace Accords
Rutgers University press release, 4 December 2018
Fires that contribute to deforestation spiked six-fold in Colombia in the year after an historic 2016 peace agreement ended decades of conflict between FARC guerrilla and government forces, according to a study in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
“This dramatic increase from trends in the last decade will boost the likelihood of deforestation in protected areas in the upcoming year,” said study co-author Laura C. Schneider, an associate professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

[France] Yellow vests: Macron’s fuel tax was no solution to climate chaos
By Maxime Combes, rs21, 4 December 2018
It is in the name of “ecological transition” and the need to “liberate households from dependence on petrol” that French Prime Minister Edouard Phillippe justified the status quo: no new proposal was announced the day after the “gilets jaunes” protests. By making the carbon tax, and hence the rise in fuel prices, the central plank of its policy to reduce fossil fuel consumption – a legitimate objective in itself – the government, blinded by an ideological and narrow understanding of the role that ecological fiscal policy can and must play, are leading the transition to a dead-end.

[France] Yellow Vests and I
By Pamela Anderson, 4 December 2018
I am glad that the media noticed my brief Twitter take on the situation in France, my adopted country, which has been experiencing a series of mass protests in the last few weeks.
Some followers accused me of “throwing support” behind the riots and violence and not understanding the problem. This is so biased. Why? Let’s see! Why these protests now?
Instead of being hypnotized by the burning images, I wanted to ask “where did the protests come from?”

[India] Tribal Araku farmers get global recognition
Deccan Chronicle, 4 December 2018
Tribal farmers who grow the now globally famous Araku Coffee are truly going places. After its thunderous debut in Paris a few months ago, Araku Coffee has become very well-known and its cultivators are being recognised and celebrated throughout the world.
In yet another global recognition, Araku farmers were recognised as Landscape Heroes by Germany-based Global Landscapes Forum (GLF), which is a multi-stakeholder platform to create productive, prosperous, equitable and climate-resilient landscapes. GLF is supported by the German government.

[Indonesia] A carbon bomb in Papua: 7 takeaways from our investigation
Gecko Project, 4 December 2018
Last week, The Gecko Project, Mongabay, Tempo and Malaysiakini published an investigation into the story behind the Tanah Merah project, a giant oil palm plantation under development in Papua, Indonesia.
The full article, which you can find here, is long, so here are seven key takeaways from it, including a brief analysis of what could happen next….

Forest evictions destroying Sengwer’s culture – report
By Lewis Nyaundi, The Star, 4 December 2018
Evictions of the Sengwer community from Embobut Forest may destroy the culture of the community, a new report reveals.
The ‘Race Against Extinction’ report, compiled from interviews with the community said the community has lost its traditions and language during successive evictions.
The indigenous community living within Cherangany Hills, Embobut and Kabolet forests, protested government’s move early this year to evict them from their ancestral land. The move is intended to pave way for the Water Tower Project.

Norway to heavily restrict palm oils linked to deforestation
By Josh Gabbatiss, Independent, 4 December 2018
Norway is to become the first country to stop its biofuel industry buying palm oil that is linked to catastrophic deforestation.
The parliamentary decision, which is set to come into force from 2020, has been welcomed as a victory in the fight to save rainforests, prevent climate change and protect endangered orang-utans.
It comes after a gradual process in which Norwegian politicians have pushed to ban harmful palm oil from their country, including a vote last year to stop the government itself purchasing the biofuel.

[UK] Heathrow lays out a roadmap for achieving a carbon neutral growth future
Green Air, 4 December 2018
Heathrow Airport has signalled its intention that by the time its proposed third runway begins operations in 2026 all new growth will be carbon neutral. This would mean that growth in emissions from additional flights after expansion would be offset through carbon credits. It expects 95% of flights departing Heathrow in 2026 to be covered by the global CORSIA carbon offsetting scheme and the airport aims to offset any remainder. Heathrow wants to play a major role in helping the aviation sector act on carbon emissions through four key areas: cleaner aircraft technology; improvements to airspace and ground operations; sustainable aviation fuels; and developing and promoting new ways of carbon offsetting. Using offsetting as an interim measure, it is planning to make the airport’s own energy use carbon neutral from 2020.

5 December 2018

‘Brutal news’: global carbon emissions jump to all-time high in 2018
By Damian Carrington, The Guardian, 5 December 2018
Global carbon emissions will jump to a record high in 2018, according to a report, dashing hopes a plateau of recent years would be maintained. It means emissions are heading in the opposite direction to the deep cuts urgently needed, say scientists, to fight climate change.

New Global CO2 Emissions Numbers Are In. They’re Not Good.
By Kelly Levin, World Resources Institute, 5 December 2018
Each year in late November or early December, climate negotiators, NGOs and increasingly cities and businesses head to the annual climate talks. Typically coinciding with these negotiations is an announcement from the Global Carbon Project, which releases its annual data on carbon dioxide emissions, backed up by peer-reviewed publications. Carbon dioxide emissions are the largest contributor to human-induced warming, and, therefore, are one of the most critical signposts to watch.

COP24: New research reveals the banks and investors financing the expansion of the global coal plant fleet
BankTrack and urgewald, 5 December 2018
While the latest IPCC and UN Emissions Gap reports both issue stark warnings on the need for an accelerated phase-out of coal power, the global coal plant fleet is still expanding. At today’s press conference during the UN Climate Summit in Katowice, Urgewald, BankTrack and 26 NGO partners released new research identifying the banks and investors backing a frightening pipeline of new coal projects.

Soil, The Indispensable Dirt.
By Tony Juniper, WWF, 5 December 2018
Beneath our feet, out of sight and often out of mind, soil is probably the least appreciated source of human well-being and security. More than simply a prerequisite for farming and food production, it is a complex web of interactions that in turn enables many of the Earth’s life support systems to function.

Slash Meat Consumption and Avert Climate Catastrophe, Says New Blueprint for ‘Sustainable Food Future’ by 2050
By Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams, 5 December 2018
To feed the growing human population—projected to reach about 10 billion by 2050—while curbing planet-warming emissions to ward off climate catastrophe, people across the globe must significantly cut back on eating meat from cows, sheep, and goats, according to a new study out Wednesday.
Limits on meat-eating are among 22 proposals from the report that, if simultaneously enacted, could achieve “meeting growing demands for food, avoiding deforestation, and reforesting or restoring abandoned and unproductive land—and in ways that help stabilize the climate, promote economic development, and reduce poverty.”

Beef-eating ‘must fall drastically’ as world population grows
By Damian Carrington, The Guardian, 5 December 2018
People in rich nations will have to make big cuts to the amount of beef and lamb they eat if the world is to be able to feed 10 billion people, according to a new report. These cuts and a series of other measures are also needed to prevent catastrophic climate change, it says.
More than 50% more food will be needed by 2050, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI) report, but greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture will have to fall by two-thirds at the same time. The extra food will have to be produced without creating new farmland, it says, otherwise the world’s remaining forests face destruction. Meat and dairy production use 83% of farmland and produce 60% of agriculture’s emissions.

Space laser will map Earth’s forests in 3D, spotting habitat for at-risk species
By Gabriel Popkin, Science, 5 December 2018
Tallying up the biomass in a forest—and monitoring changes to it—is no easy task. You can cordon off a patch of forest and use tape measures to assess tree growth, hoping your patch is representative of the wider forest. Or you can turn to aerial or satellite photography—if the pictures are available and sharp enough. But even the best cameras can’t see past the forest canopy to the understory below.
On 5 December, scientists gained a new tool for this tricky business when NASA’s Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) was launched on a SpaceX rocket.

Extreme floods on the rise in the Amazon: study
By Claire Asher, Mongabay, 5 December 2018
While deepening droughts that have made headlines in recent years, extreme floods have been steadily increasing in frequency and severity in parts of the Amazon basin, putting lives and livelihoods at risk. According to a new study, longer and more extreme floods are becoming increasingly common due to a combination of fluctuations in atmospheric circulation systems and human-driven climate change.

Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at its fastest rate in 350 years
Yale Environment 360, 5 December 2018
The Greenland ice sheet is melting faster today than at any point in the last 350 years, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. The research is the first continuous, multi-century analysis of melting and runoff on the ice sheet, one of the largest drivers of sea level rise globally.
Lead by glaciologist and climate scientist Luke Trusel of Rowan University, a team of U.S. and European researchers analyzed more than three centuries of melt patterns in ice cores from western Greenland. They then linked this historical data to modern observations of melting and runoff across the entire ice sheet, creating a timeline dating back to 1650.

Wildfires in Russia are like a horror movie
Greenpeace, 5 December 2018
“Being here is like being in a horror movie. I look around and wonder how could it happen? Could we have prevented it?” this is Solbon Sandgiev, a Siberian volunteer firefighter.
We are surrounded by many square kilometers of scorched trunks. I remember a rich boreal forest growing here. We stand on the black soil and charred wood, our boots are covered with grey ash. Somewhere in the distance, we hear the sound of a chainsaw.

The US must cut emissions, not forests
By Danna Smith, Dogwood Alliance, 5 December 2018
In the last two years across the US, extreme weather linked to climate change has left thousands dead and cost tens of billions of dollars, disproportionately impacting the elderly, children, the poor, and people of color. By all scientific accounts, it’s going to get worse. How much worse depends entirely on the rate and extent to which we are willing to embrace rapid and far-reaching changes across society.

6 December 2018

Aligning Finance Is the Forgotten Goal of the Paris Agreement, But It Is Vital to Successful Climate Action
By Joe Thwaites, Shelagh Whitley, Helena Wright, and Caroline Ott, World Resources Institute, 6 December 2018
The 2015 Paris Agreement broke new ground by including, as one of its three long-term goals, a commitment to “making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development.” This is (Article 2.1c).
It doesn’t make headlines as often as the other two long-term goals: to limit global average temperature rise (Article 2.1a) and to increase the ability to adapt to climate impacts (Article 2.1b). However, without aligning finance, the mitigation and adaptation goals will not be achieved.

How Do You Measure The Amount Of Carbon In A Tree?
By Patrick Skahill, New England Public Radio, 6 December 2018
The latest national climate assessment says forests play a key role in keeping our air clean.
According to the report, America’s forests stored the equivalent of 11 percent of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions over a 25 year period.
That’s because when trees breathe they suck up carbon dioxide, release oxygen, and store that leftover carbon in their trunks.

Is the End of Cocoa-Related Deforestation Within Reach?
By Richard Scobey, TFA 2020, 6 December 2018
“How much rainforest is in that chocolate bar?,” asked the World Resources Institute in a thoughtful blog several years ago. The answer today is still way too much. Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, which produce about 65% of the global cocoa supply, have lost 17% and 13% of their forest cover, respectively, from 2001 to 2017, primarily as a result of agricultural encroachment.

In Katowice, Indigenous Leaders Call For Wider Uptake Of REDD+
By Declan Foraise, Ecosystem Marketplace, 6 December 2018
“RIA lives!” said Peruvian indigenous leader Fermín Chimatani Tayori, referring to a private-public partnership called “Amazon Indigenous REDD+”, an eight-year effort to develop protocols and projects that use carbon finance to support indigenous development plans called “Life Plans” (Planes de Vida).

[Indonesia] Jokowi Must Attend COP24
By Nirarta ‘Koni’ Samadhi, LinkedIn, 6 December 2018
A rare statement came from a coal-based energy businessman during the opening of the Indonesian Clean Energy Forum on Nov 15, who said that securing investment for coal power plants was getting harder. Some of his international funders have even stopped investing in coal power plants. On the other hand, he said, transitioning to renewable energy was not that easy, as many regulatory issues hampered the development of renewable energy. He concluded that while coal-based energy was headed toward extinction, renewable energy did not have the support it needed to survive.

[Indonesia] The most important country for the global climate no one is talking about
By Nithin Coca, Vox, 6 December 2018
World leaders are gathered this month in Katowice, Poland, for COP24, the most important global meeting on climate change since the 2015 UN Climate Conference in Paris. At the top of agenda: getting countries to agree on rules to implement the Paris climate accords for 2020, when the pact goes into effect.

CO2 prices dive on news of additional Polish auctions
By Alessandro Vitelli, Montel, 6 December 2018
Carbon prices dropped sharply at the start of trading on Thursday after Poland announced last night that it will auction a further 55.8m EUAs in 2019 from a special reserve.
The benchmark Dec 18 EUA contract dropped to a low of EUR 17.99/t on Ice Futures just 25 minutes after trading began, before rallying to trade at EUR 18.66/t, a drop of 5.1% from Wednesday’s closing price.
Total screen-based trade in the contract was nearly 19m tonnes by 12:00 CET.
“[The decline] is largely down to the Polish news,” a London-based trader told Montel…. [R-M: Subscription needed.]

[USA] On the Line: A Bright REDD+ Line
The Progressive, 6 December 2018
With a vacuum of federal leadership on climate change, California Governor Jerry Brown convened a first-of-its-kind Global Climate Action Summit in September to forge “deeper worldwide commitments” among global leaders. But the exclusive gathering failed to include those most impacted by the crisis, instead inviting some of the institutions most responsible for it. On the second day of the summit, hundreds of people representing frontline communities, environmental justice organizations, and indigenous groups blocked the entrance, risking arrest. They called out market-based schemes touted at the conference, such as carbon pricing, as false solutions to the climate crisis.

7 December 2018

Global alignment of climate plans pushed to 2041 in UN draft
By Karl Mathiesen, Climate Home News, 7 December 2018
The start date of an important element of the Paris Agreement would be set 23 years in the future under a proposal from major emerging economies.
Under the Paris Agreement, all countries are expected to periodically submit national plans to fight climate change. One of the legal specifications was that they would synchronise, beginning at the same time and running for the same term.
These “common time frames” are intended to allow for comparison and create pressure between countries to do more.

Concern in Indonesia over Norway’s move against biofuels derived from deforestation
By Linda Yulisman, The Straits Times, 7 December 2018
Indonesia’s government as well its palm oil producers have expressed concern that Norway may have set a precedent by becoming the first country in the world to exclude biofuels derived from deforestation.
The move by the Norwegian Parliament on Tuesday (Dec 4) will have a negligible impact on exports from Indonesia, which is the world’s largest producer of palm oil.
“Although the impact will not be significant (on our exports), that will become a bad example for other countries,” Dr Fadhil Hasan, the director for foreign affairs of the Indonesian Palm Oil Producers Association, told The Straits Times.

8 December 2018

Shell oil executive boasts about his ability to influence the Paris agreement
By Kate Aronoff, The Intercept, 8 December 2018
Shell Oil helped write the Paris climate agreement, according to a top Royal Dutch Shell executive.
They’re also the world’s ninth-largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions.
The executive, Shell’s Chief Climate Change Adviser David Hone, made his comments at the international climate change conference COP 24 on Friday. Hone was candid about just how much of a hand his company — through their involvement with the International Emissions Trading Association — had in writing the Paris agreement.

Airlines ignoring efficient planes in blow to carbon targets – study
By Fiona Harvey, The Guardian, 8 December 2018
Airlines are failing to take up the most efficient planes in sufficient numbers to make a significant dent in their carbon dioxide emissions, a new study has found.
The most efficient new aircraft models, such as the Boeing 787-9 and Airbus A350-900 and A320neo, can achieve substantial carbon savings over older models, but no airlines have invested sufficiently in the new types to reach the top levels of energy efficiency, according to a ranking by Atmosfair, a German NGO.

Climate science on 1.5C erased at UN talks as US and Saudis step in
By Sara Stefanini and Karl Mathiesen, Climate Home News, 8 December 2018
Four big oil and gas producers blocked UN climate talks from welcoming the most influential climate science report in years, as a meeting in Poland descended into acrimony on Saturday.
By failing to reach agreement after two and half hours of emotional negotiations, delegates in Katowice set the scene for a political fight next week over the importance of the UN’s landmark scientific report on the effects of a 1.5C rise in the global temperature.

9 December 2018

With 12 years to limit warming, it’s time to sprint, not run
By Gabrielle Lipton, CIFOR Landscape News, 9 December 2018
We are in the ‘age of adaptation’ to climate change, said Conservation International’s president Jennifer Morris at the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) side event at COP 24 in Katowice, Poland on 9 December. Yet, we are seeing a rise in projects and mindsets focused on ‘short-termism’ rather than long-term value to the planet’s future. We need better models, she said, that provide long-lasting benefits to ecosystems and people.

Can Blockchains Save The Earth?
By Andrew Ancheta, Crypto Briefing, 9 December 2018
Ethereum isn’t exactly a green technology, but a new application on the blockchain could put a serious dent in carbon emissions. Granular, an agricultural company under the DowDuPont umbrella, has partnered with a blockchain startup to help business reduce their environmental footprints. Granular will provide optional early access to Nori (NORI), a blockchain-based carbon market, allowing farmers to gain additional revenue by reducing atmospheric carbon.
The partnership was announced in a joint press release, in which the companies declared their shared goal of “turning carbon into a cash crop.”

Australia’s silence during climate change debate shocks COP24 delegates
By Ben Doherty, The Guardian, 9 December 2018
As four of the world’s largest oil and gas producers blocked UN climate talks from “welcoming” a key scientific report on global warming, Australia’s silence during a key debate is being viewed as tacit support for the four oil allies: the US, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Kuwait.
The end of the first week of the UN climate talks – known as COP24 – in Katowice, Poland, has been mired by protracted debate over whether the conference should “welcome” or “note” a key report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Brazil to review Paris Agreement status, says Bolsonaro environment minister
By Fabiano Maisonnave, Climate Home News, 9 December 2018
Brazil’s far right president-elect Jair Bolsonaro has picked a staunch ‘beef caucus’ ally to lead his environment department.
Ricardo de Aquino Salles, a 43-year-old lawyer, recently won the backing of the ruralists, one of Congress’ most powerful lobby groups.
In his first interview after the official announcement, the appointed minister told the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper the “discussion whether there is global warming or not is secondary” and “innocuous”.

[Fiji] REDD+ Coordinator appointed
Fiji Broadcasting Corporation, 9 December 2018
The new Permanent Secretary for Forestry, Pene Baleinabuli has appointed Viliame Rabici as the Coordinator for the REDD+ Unit within the Ministry.
The Unit deals with activities addressing the effects of climate change through the reduction of emissions from deforestation, forest degradation and conservation and the sustainable management of forests.
As coordinator, Rabici will ensure that the REDD+ Project is critically implemented within the next 24 months of Fiji’s REDD+ Readiness phase.

Development of future scenario to make PNG’s forestry industry sustainable
EMTV, 9 December 2018
Over fifty stakeholders from the Government, the private sector and civil society have come together to discuss the development of a future scenario for engagement and investment in the Forestry Sector in Papua New Guinea on Friday, December 7, 2018.
Led by the PNG Forest Authority with the support of Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) REDD+ Readiness project facilitated by the United Nations Development Programme, the discussions centered on how best to achieve the Government’s ambitious target, to ban all round log exports and increase downstream processing by 2020 supported by the expansion of plantation forests covering 800,000 hectares by 2050.

Published

REDDisms:

“Instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion-dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that [Goldman Sachs] gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an ‘environmental plan,’ called cap-and-trade.”